Gateway ADC-320

Even the smallest digital media hub adds one more box to your AV gear, not to mention more cables. Enter the Gateway ADC-320, a multifunction DVD player. In addition to playing DVDs and CDs, it streams your PC's digital music, photos, and videos to your AV system. Expect to see a slew of similar products in mid-2004.

The ADC-320 looks like a standard DVD player, except for a PC Card slot in back that holds a wired or wireless Ethernet card; an 802.11g wireless adapter is included, along with a 44-button remote and a software applet for the host PC. Annoyingly, there's a 16-character CD key to prevent use on other UPnP devices, which we find unlikely. Memo to Gateway: Don't flatter yourself. The software's not that good. You can control most multimedia functions from the front panel.

The ADC-320 plays MP3 and WMA files, shows photos, and plays MPEG videos, but slideshows don't have a music-background feature. The player handles CDs too, but doesn't look up discs online. It's a progressive-scan DVD player, with outputs including component video and optical digital audio.

The on-screen interface is easy to navigate. A bar on the left lets you pick Audio, Photos, or Movies (video), and the right gives you such options as Genres and Folders. During playback, you can see artist, album, elapsed time, and the current and next 10 tracks (some interfaces don't even show the next track). Album art is not available.

The player's core performance was fine, but we found plenty to nitpick. The ADC-320 has a mirror face and buttons so tiny you may need a magnifying glass. Rather than showing what song is playing or a photo's filename, the display shows only the elapsed time or the number of the photo in the sequence. To navigate, you can search for a word or jump to a song or album number, but you can't jump to albums starting with a specific letter.

Because of the ADC-320's 54-Mbps wireless card, we saw no performance problems. Note that if you also have 802.11b devices in your house, a burst of traffic may slow the ADC-320 down to almost b-level speeds, making video playback choppy (but not audio or photo playback).

The ADC-320 will have plenty of competition in the near future, and Apex offers a similar product at about $200 (street). For now, the Gateway ADC-320 provides a simple way to handle DVD and CD in addition to digital media playback. If you're about to upgrade to a progressive-scan DVD player anyway, the PC multimedia features add just $100 to the bottom line.

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